The advent of global communications networks such as the Internet has presented commercial opportunities for reaching vast numbers of potential customers. In particular, the Internet has become a major platform for advertising, allowing local and regional businesses to reach more states and more customers across the country. Due to the lower costs and wider distribution areas, advertising via the Internet is often more preferred than other, more conventional tactics such as print-ads and billboards. As a result, websites have become cluttered with various types of advertisements such as banner advertisements located at different positions throughout a web page and/or website. In addition to advertising content, most web pages typically have navigation panels including site indices, table of contents, search bar, and the like to assist a web user in maneuvering through the site. Moreover, there is usually a large amount of extraneous content on any given web page, which can make printing web pages a challenge.
Printing information off of a web page or site such news stories, research articles, lottery numbers, sports scores, and the like can often be a difficult and frustrating process. When a user wants to print a web page, they are usually only interested in seeing the defining content (e.g., news story, sports scores, etc.) on the printed page and not the extraneous content. Furthermore, some web pages cannot be printed as they appear, particularly for those users who want to print the entire web page. For example, some portion of the page can be inadvertently cut off during printing or cannot be printed without substantially modifying the print paper size and/or margins.
In an attempt to resolve this problem, a few web sites offer a print friendly version option. However, this feature is only available from such particular sites that have specifically included or paid for this feature. In some cases, a web use may want to print some “non-useful” portion of a web page but not the entire page and/or not all the printable pages. The conventional print user friendly option currently employed produces only one configuration and does not allow a user to select which portions of the page to print. Conversely, using a general print option on a browser causes too much unnecessary information to be printed. Hence, this attempt has not been able to resolve online printing. Moreover, printing desired content off of web pages can often be and still is unproductive and inefficient.